Development in Theological Method and Argument in John of Damascus

Terminological confusion exacerbated by councils divided the church in late antiquity. John of Damascus addressed the resultant terminological impasse by providing the re-established Jerusalem patriarchate with theological polemic that reemphasized the preeminence of the Council of Nicaea. John’s early works relied on scripture and patristic argument, but after his philosophical works, his theological method couched scripture and patristic argument in terms of a new philosophical acumen. Building on this change in theological method, I argue that John’s theological argument also underwent development using the term “perichōrēsis” as a case study, resulting in a provisional date-list of John’s polemical works. I then argue that development in John appears to have an ecumenical motivation by analyzing his redeployment of the theological technical term “perichōrēsis” from his Christology to his Trinitarianism. I argue that John subordinates his Christology to a terminologically clarified Nicene Trinitarianism in order to address concerns of his local inter-locutors by re-casting local christological debate in three ways: 1) he couched his Christology in terms of a specifically Nicene heresiology shifting fifth- and sixth-century theologians off-stage, whether Cyril of Alexandria, Severus of Antioch, or Maximus the Confessor, pushing Gregory of Nazianzus to the fore as universal authority; 2) he avoided the critique of Aristotelianism by couching his Christology in terms of the Nicene locus classicus, John 10.30; and finally, 3) he adroitly granted but restated the theological premise of his interlocutors turning their argument on its head. Thus, John grounds his innovative theological polemic in the tradition while providing his bishop and the newly re-established patriarchate with a more progressive and ecumenical theological method, argument, and polemic.